CHAPTER 1.X.

(Better defence than
shield or breastplate is holy innocence
to the naked breast.)

And they buried the musician and his barbiton together,
in the same coffin. That famous Steiner—­primeval
Titan of the great Tyrolese race—­often
hast thou sought to scale the heavens, and therefore
must thou, like the meaner children of men, descend
to the dismal Hades! Harder fate for thee than
thy mortal master. For thy soul sleeps with
thee in the coffin. And the music that belongs
to his, separate from the instrument, ascends
on high, to be heard often by a daughter’s pious
ears when the heaven is serene and the earth sad.
For there is a sense of hearing that the vulgar know
not. And the voices of the dead breathe soft
and frequent to those who can unite the memory with
the faith.

And now Viola is alone in the world,—­alone
in the home where loneliness had seemed from the cradle
a thing that was not of nature. And at first
the solitude and the stillness were insupportable.
Have you, ye mourners, to whom these sibyl leaves,
weird with many a dark enigma, shall be borne, have
you not felt that when the death of some best-loved
one has made the hearth desolate,—­have you
not felt as if the gloom of the altered home was too
heavy for thought to bear?—­you would leave
it, though a palace, even for a cabin. And yet,—­sad
to say,—­when you obey the impulse, when
you fly from the walls, when in the strange place in
which you seek your refuge nothing speaks to you of
the lost, have ye not felt again a yearning for that
very food to memory which was just before but bitterness
and gall? Is it not almost impious and profane
to abandon that dear hearth to strangers? And
the desertion of the home where your parents dwelt,
and blessed you, upbraids your conscience as if you
had sold their tombs.

Beautiful was the Etruscan superstition that the ancestors
become the household gods. Deaf is the heart
to which the Lares call from the desolate floors in
vain. At first Viola had, in her intolerable anguish,
gratefully welcomed the refuge which the house and
family of a kindly neighbour, much attached to her
father, and who was one of the orchestra that Pisani
shall perplex no more, had proffered to the orphan.
But the company of the unfamiliar in our grief, the
consolation of the stranger, how it irritates the
wound! And then, to hear elsewhere the name of
father, mother, child,—­as if death came
alone to you,—­to see elsewhere the calm
regularity of those lives united in love and order,
keeping account of happy hours, the unbroken timepiece
of home, as if nowhere else the wheels were arrested,
the chain shattered, the hands motionless, the chime
still! No, the grave itself does not remind us